Looking at a few forums, debian/ubuntu and playing with with 2.6.14.2 latest kernel on gentoo, it looks like sparc64 is broken.

Anyone else notice this? I thought it was me, until I downloaded a few daily sparc 64 builds, and all show the same boot problems on a 2.6 kernel. And I updated my latest 2.4 kernel (and blew away my working and fully stable one) DOH!

2.6 kernels for sparc aren't quite ready for different reasons on different machine models.
For instance the blade 100/150 framebuffer issue is known, other problems include flaky onboard sound (sun-cs4231) driver and not-so-stable on UltraSPARC-II based machines (IIi & IIe not included).
That's the reason we still recommend 2.4 over 2.6._________________Gustavo Zacarias
Gentoo/SPARC monkey